Seventh Plague of Egypt

In September 1822 the French scholar Jean-François Champollion announced that he had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, and London was already hungry for anything from the Nile. The year before, the explorer Giovanni Belzoni had filled the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly with a reconstruction of a pharaoh's tomb. Martin painted this in 1823 and wrote the date beside his name at the lower left. It shows the seventh plague in the Book of Exodus, when Moses stretches his rod toward heaven and thunder, hail and fire come down on Egypt. Moses and his brother Aaron stand on a balustrade at the left, while the pharaoh and his people cower among the towering buildings of Thebes. For that architecture Martin turned to some of the earliest illustrated books on Egyptian monuments. He showed the picture in 1824 at the first exhibition of the new Society of British Artists in London, and in 1825 John Lambton, later Earl of Durham, bought it for 500 guineas. It stayed with his family for more than a century. At a sale held at Lambton Castle in 1932 it fetched 15 pounds, and in 1960 the Museum of Fine Arts paid 900 pounds for it.